EXIT SEKAGYA, CONTINUE KIPROTICH

Last month’s retirement of former Ugandan Cranes captain Ibrahim Sekagya followed only days later by marathon runner Stephen Kiprotich’s second place finish in the Tokyo marathon, maybe considered a passing of the baton between two of our generations most accomplished athletes.

Kiprotich, the current Olympic and World Champion, may have captured our collective imaginations with his burst from obscurity in the last three years, but Sekagya has been a consummate professional in his sport for close to two decades.

There is every indication that the level headed Kiprotich, barring any injuries, will be a contender for top honours in any marathon he races for a few years to come, but Sekagya has displayed a consistency in performance only reserved for the truly great.

True, Sekagya’s Cranes teams never won the Africa Cup of Nations, leave alone qualify for the continent’s premier showpiece or the World Cup for that matter. Sekagya played in the Champion’s league but his teams never won.

Success is relative. 

In a country like Uganda ,starved of high level sporting success Sekagya is a god, in Brazil he would be a straggler. But credit to Sekagya he did not rest on his laurels, even though for the greater part of his career he was head and shoulders above his local contemporaries.

The story has not been told but how many times did he dread returning to the European winter after a holiday break back in Uganda? How many times did he look at what he had achieved, accumulated, looked at his friends here and wondered why he was sweating? How many times away from home, hounded by injury and his mind wracked with self-doubt, did he wish he could just lie down and give up?

"Whichever way you look at it, it is hard to take away anything from Sekagya’s achievements. The true accomplishment of Sekagya’s career was that he was able to rise above the mediocrity, the whining and bitching of his countrymen, which would have easily weighed his spirit down to not only survive but thrive on a greater stage. He committed to the discipline on and off the pitch not only for days or weeks or even months, but for years on end, in order to unleash his full potential.

We forget that he was part of a talented team that made it to the semis of the All African Games soccer competition in 1999. While he was a talent, some people who watched him play then would not choose him ahead of Andrew Mukasa, Hassan Mubiru or Willy Kyambade. 

The difference between the best and the rest on any level is not down to physical attributes --- talent, speed, strength or stamina but it is down to the more spiritual aspects, emotional maturity and mental toughness.

At a certain level of achievement in sport, the physical side is a given but what separates the boys from the men is the inner man or woman.

When we drill down to the real difference between Sekagya and his contemporaries, I wouldl not be surprised to discover that Sekagya first, did not aim for glory with a mind of blowing his earnings in the night clubs and getting back at all the girls in his younger days who never gave him  the time of day. He probably did it for the love of the game and the thrill of pushing beyond perceived limits. The fame and fortune were a by-product of the process and nothing to get distracted by.

"There is a formula that applies to sport but also life: mental discipline leads to concentration, concentration leads to consistency, consistency leads to momentum and momentum leads to victory...

Which brings us to Kiprotich. 

No one, who has half an inclining of what work Kiprotich puts into getting ready to perform, would accuse him of being a natural talent. He probably doesn’t think he is a natural talent himself.

It about grinding out the kilometres come sun or rain, no excuses, no complaining.

We might put down their phenomenal success to some inborn talent. We might even go further accusing them of being lucky, of being, at certain points in their lives, at the right place at the right time.

But those will all be excuses on our part to justify our continued wallowing in mediocrity.

They say to tell how a man will turn out later in life, look out for who his boyhood heroes were. If he was impressed by the glitz and glamour of the village playboy he will somehow gravitate in that direction. If on the other hand his heroes were the no frills neighbour, honest to a fault, a diligent worker and thrifty with his resources the boy might have a chance in life.

So let these be our children’s heros, these young men who have risen from the mediocrity of their societies, never shirked a day of hard work and while reveling in their success, have kept a good head on their shoulders.

OUR SECURITY IS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO THE POLICE

Tomorrow Saturday, February 28^th Inspector General of Police Major General Kale Kaihura will be leading hundreds of runners through the hills of Ibanda in attempt to raise awareness about the benefits of community policing.

The inaugural run will be contested over 5-, 12- and 21-km, funds from the event will go towards the welfare of the 900 crime preventers in the area. The recruitment of crime preventers in local communities was an initiative by the police to augment their own capacity in preventing and detecting crime. The crime preventers are volunteers who are taught basic policing skills to help secure their respective communities.

In 2013 about 100,000 criminal cases were reported to the police a marginal decrease from the previous year, but seen in a different perspective, one criminal case avoided is one less person living in fear.

"Of course all crime is not reported and it’s probably a compliment to the police that people even report crimes to them, a sign probably of growing confidence in the force by the public...

Better manned, better equipped and better facilitated than a decade ago the police presence cannot be ignored.

However even if there were police men patrolling at every street corner they would not take away the role of popular vigilance, the determination by the very society they police to look out for crime and play an active role in preventing and aiding in the apprehension of offenders.

They say there is no secret between two people. For every crime committed someone knows something either before it is committed or after the fact. If the right reporting structures are put in place imagine how dramatically the crime levels can fall.

Beyond that the initiative is being driven by the private sector and spearheaded by the police. The people who stand to lose the most by an escalation in insecurity are the business community. They would have to incur higher costs to secure their business and also have to factor in the cost of uncertainty that comes with insecurity or pack up their business and take them elsewhere or wait out the cycle of insecurity.

The irony is that since the insecurity is often caused by restless, jobless youth, a slow down or shuttering of businesses denies the youth the very jobs that would keep them out of trouble. A vicious cycle.

"Its good to see businessmen putting aside their daily rivalries to try and solve a community problem that if resolved would benefit everyone...

However we have to always guard against them doing it to obtain some leverage over our government institutions. The police budget is channeled through the consolidated fund. However it does not take a genius to recognise that the police remain woefully underfunded.

The funds from these and future runs will go mainly to beefing up the community policing capacity – the crime preventers and constructing police booths for instance. This money should be monitored and accounted for so that it goes to the purpose it is meant, if only to maintain public confidence in the partnership.

And finally there is a way for the public to contribute to these kind of endeavors in a more structured way.

The police can borrow from the public using the bond markets. People are always weary of increasing public debt – the debt contracted by government and its institutions from the public, but if there is one thing we have learnt in the last 30 years is that without security nothing matters.

It is by the grace of God that crime rates are not higher in Uganda, given how badly the police is facilitated, but we shouldn’t wait for all hell to break loose before we make a move.

The Ibanda Marathon is a good initiative that should be supported and rolled out in other districts in Uganda.

IT’S NOT GREEK! WHAT IS HAPPENING TO GREECE CAN HAPPEN TO US

While we have been preoccupied with our internal politics Greece has been teethering at the edge of economic disaster.

Imagine you inherit a house in Kololo, with a 25 meter pool, a fantastic lawn and garden, 50 bulb-house and a staff complement of five. After the initial euphoria of living in Kololo has worn off (probably by the time of the first workers’ paycheck) it will begin to dawn on you that you might be playing out of your league.

But you might soldier on thinking that you have arrived because you live in Kololo.

You will soon realise too that to keep up with your neighbours your security lights have to be on all night, you have to own a fuel guzzling 4wd – not one, but at least two, one for you and one for your better half, you might have to throw a few garden parties, if only to “revenge” for the ones you have been invited to.

You soon realise that the expenses are mounting faster than your boss can afford you a raise.

You can do one of two things. Either, sell the house or rent it out and move to a neighbourhood where you can keep up with the Jones, better still where you can be THE Jones or raid your bank, the local loan shark, friends and family to keep up the lifestyle.

The latter is the more sensible solution but oftentimes, out of pride and our unwillingness to take a downgrade to our new lifestyle, we opt for the second.

Before not long debt payments catch up with you and suddenly the walls around your compound serve as a prison. That is if your better half is not insisting on sustaining the fictitious standard of living – at least outside your compound here people can see you making a retreat behind the walls less than a pleasant experience.

By the end of the day you may lose your inheritance, your family and your pride as the debt collectors give you no breathing space within which to manoeuvre.

That in a nut shell is what happened to Greece.

It was invited to the European Community in 1981 and 20 years later join the Eurozone, the group of western European countries that use the Euro as their currency.

With that the Greeks embarked on a huge public spending spree – of course to keep up with their wealthier European neighbours, the spruced up their infrastructure, paid for an extremely expensive Olympic Games in 2004 and raised public service salaries by as much as 50%.

"Things may have worked had the global financial crisis not rolled in in 2008 and exposed how the Greeks were living way beyond their means. As if that was not enough they were hiding debt off the books and tax evasion is a national past time. Which was a double whammy because not only were their repayments mounting but their taxes collections could not honour their obligations...

If they were a person, Greece would long have been declared bankrupt and their assets parcelled out to willing buyers to pay off their debtors.

But Greece is a country – and thankfully not Uganda, so they were bailed out twice in 2010 and 2014, with conditions attached. Among  the conditions were that they would collect more tax, privatise their public enterprises and cut down on public spending.

Politics did not allow them live up to the conditions and in fact in January the Greeks voted in a government that had pledged to throw out these austerity measures and tell the EU to jump in the Mediterranean.

By the time of writing this column a Friday deadline was looming. The Greeks had blinked earlier in the week and suggested they may accept some extension to the debt. Germany, the EU’s economic loadstone, said without accepting the full conditions for another bailout they would veto any rescue plan.

However observers were already saying it would not be as much of a tragedy if the Greeks left he EU as compared to the last two times. Previously they owed a lot of private banks money, defaulting on the debt would have infected the rest of Europe. Now the debt -- €320b (sh1,070b)  or four times the size of the  East African Community economy is owed  mostly to governments, who are better placed to survive a collapse.

"It is easy to see how they got to where they are. There are only two ways to spend money to consume it or to invest it. The latter gives you a good chance of ending rich, the former is guaranteed to pauperise you...

The Greeks are learning the hard way.

JANANI LUWUM: LET’S PLEDGE “NEVER AGAIN!”

Last week we commemorated the death of Archbishop Janani Luwum, who was killed in February 16, 1977 following allegations he was collaborating with the forces opposed to then president Idi Amin.

The official record is that he was killed during interrogation, but there is a strong suspicion that Amin himself may have actually pulled the trigger himself.

We read how attempts to portray Luwum’s death as a car accident didn’t hold. One nurse from Mulago testified that she saw bullet holes on his neck and chest, while another reported that a badly beaten Luwum joined other inmates briefly in the cells of the State Research Bureau (SRB) in Nakasero ours before his death.

During it all the good Archbishop does not seem to have lose his poise or lost his faith in his God. A useful study courage, defined as grace under pressure.

Reconstructing the mood of the time does not take a fertile imagination.

"An isolated Amin, by this time six years into his reign of terror, was seeing opponents – real and imagined around every corner. Either because of his limited exposure to the structures of civil society or because of a total disregard for due process or because he could, he and his system were eliminating people on pure suspicion....

The terror was made all the more universal, the anecdotal evidence suggests, with some people taking advantage of the situation to settle personal scores, to grab property or take over people’s girlfriends and wives.

Clearly Luwum fell prey to this heightened sense of paranoia, whether he sympathised with the opponents of Amin’s clumsy administration or not.

It has been suggested that the death of Luwum was the straw that broke the camel’s back, finally raising international awareness to the extent of how things had gone wrong in Uganda and galvanising support for regime change in Kampala.

Looking back almost 40 years it is maybe hard to fathom how things came to that.

A younger person in his 30s who ardently followed the series of articles on the Vision Group’s various platforms, leading up to the commemoration on Monday, was in genuine shock while declaring, “So Amin was this bad?”

Shock because in his experience it would be inconceivable for a senior prelate in such and secondly that a president would be personally involved (that is what he is convinced happened) in such an act.

It is probably that same naïvete that allowed Amin to run rough shod over the population and by the time people had got over their gullibility and stopped giving him the benefit of doubt, they were paralysed with terror and unable to mount any meaningful opposition internally.

It is useful to celebrate the life of Luwum, even make it a public holiday, but he would have died in vain if we do not look beyond the horror of the time to understand how the situation degenerated to such depths.

We can blame it on the politics.

Our post-independence politicians in trying to outmaneuver each other resorted to extrajudicial methods, circumventing established institutions and generally setting precedents that continue to reverberate down our history.

Once the powers that be begun to ignore the laws to ensure they got their way, they had begun the slide down a very slippery slope into chaos.

By February 1977 anything could go.

Agency or the role of an individual or group of people in shaping events will always be critical in the unfolding of history, but the sustainability of those changes or their continued progress, will depend on the viability of the society’s institutions.

Maybe one can’t fault a young independent Uganda whose institutions had not matured enough as to call the main actors to order at the time.

Maybe our major players were just inherently averse to operating in structured situations and preferred fluid situations where the ends justified the means and to hell with the rest.

Maybe we can blame fate that a coincidence of events that did not happen in neighbouring Kenya or Tanzania happened here and the problems of the 1970s and 1980s were predestined.

"They say that those that do not learn from history are bound to repeat the mistakes of the past. It offers no solace that they also say that, what we learn from history is that we do not learn from history...

Hence the importance of a deeper commemoration of Luwum’s death.

Thousands of people died during that horrific eight years of our history, and as inconceivable as it seems we can return to such a time unless we internalise and learn from what led to that dark age and determine that “Never Again!”